A long, interesting, humor-laden picture of medieval Japan, story concerns efforts of a beaten warlord (Toshiro Mifune) to sneak his defeated princess (Misa Uehara) out of enemy territory, where their hidden fortress is situated, into a friendly province with the family’s gold. They’re aided and distracted, alternately, by two greedy yokels (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) who stumble on the gold and their hiding place.
Chiaki and Fujiwara are very funny as the yokels, and Mifune is properly heroic as the warlord. The beautiful Uehara does a nice acting job, too.
But the picture is really director Akira Kurosawa’s, who takes what could have been a terribly unwieldy subject and makes it believable and highly entertaining. Ichio Yamazaki’s camerawork is first-rate.
